Nod joined the fun. He grabbed T-3’s left foot and twisted—hard. T-3 screamed. Then he regained his composure long enough to auto-rotate out of Nod’s grasp like a goddamn M8 NOTAR Little Bird7 and deliver a hufuckingmongous kick to the SEAL’s balls, which sent poor Nod spasming onto the floor, his knees tucked in agony.
This was no fun. I bitch-slapped T-3 with my empty pistol. That stunned him for a second. I dropped the pistol and tried to transition to the MP5 so I could put the cocksucker out of his misery—and mine. But then he came in close, grabbed the subgun barrel again, and slapped me upside the ol’ Roguish head with it, catching me from cheek to ear, right alongside my eye.
Oh, that hurt. I tried to focus and wrap him up because he was close enough for me to bear-hug him now. Don’t forget, friends, I am a big, strong mother-fucker who presses 455 pounds, 150 reps, every fucking day on the outdoor weight pile at Rogue Manor. But I guess T-3 didn’t know that, because he was having nothing to do with my wrap-up exercises. He wriggled out of my grasp, and swiveled as if to get away. Then, with sudden and renewed ferocity, he turned, grabbed my French braid with both of his hands, and cracked it like a whip, up/down, up/down, smashing my head smack-smack into the floor.
I saw fucking stars. Belay that. I saw the whole Milky fucking Way. My entire universe went white. I saw spots. And then, in between the stars and galaxies, I saw the tip of T-3’s Doc Martens steel-toed boot coming toward my head. And then—blackness.
I awoke suddenly, shook myself into full consciousness, rolled onto my hands and knees, looked around the small bedroom, and realized that T-3 had scarpered.8 I struggled to my feet. I tried to focus on the big dial of the watch on my left wrist. I’d been out about a minute and a half. Nod was nowhere to be seen. I staggered out of the bedroom. “Boomerang—”
“Yo, Boss Dude.” Boomerang was in the far corner of the living room, beyond two head-shot tango corpses. He was kneeling over one of the Brits, his thumb pressed firmly on a large wet patch, dark with arterial blood, on the Para’s chest. Gill’s eyes were misted over. His skin was blue white. “Lucky shot caught the sumbitch under the armhole of his vest, Boss Dude. Nasty. I sent Nod for help—all our fucking radios are out.” He looked up at me. “I don’t think Gill’s gonna make it.”
“Where’s the other Brit—Bill?”
Boomerang jerked his thumb toward the small kitchen. “Working in there to make sure those goddamn bombs don’t go off, I think.”
This op had really turned into a goatfuck. “What about the guy with the package?”
Boomerang’s forehead wrinkled up in concern. “What guy?”
“The tango in the bedroom who kicked the shit out of me and took off.”
Boomerang’s eyes went wide. “I never saw anybody come out of the bedroom, Boss Dude,” he said.
“Shit.” I lunged down the hallway toward the corridor. I looked to starboard. The corridor was empty. I looked to port, down to where I’d left Elevator Lady unconscious.
The grocery bag was still right where Boomerang had set it down. But Elevator Lady had disappeared. All that was left were duct tape remnants, the long loden overcoat, the beret—and a black wig. I didn’t need a fucking Ph.D. to grasp the fact that Elevator Lady was now a definite part of the tactical problem. Worse: Butch Wells, whom I’d left watching her and the elevator, was missing. The elevator door was closed. Why? Because EL and T-3 had used it to make their getaway.
I pressed the transmit button on my radio. “Butch—yo, Butch.” There was nothing but silence. I had a very, very bad feeling in the pit of my gut. Oh fuck, oh shit, oh doom on Dickie.
I looked at the second-hand timer on my watch. Five minutes and forty-six seconds of total cluster-fuckery had elapsed since we’d come up the stairs to take down the apartment. This was probably the worst screwup I’d ever been involved in, and I knew in the depths of my Roguish heart that I was gonna be operating in payback mode for a long, long time to come.
3
I THOUGHT MY DAY HAD ALREADY TURNED COMPLETELY to shit. I was wrong. Things actually went from badder to worser over the next few minutes. You already sense Butch Wells was dead. And that T-3 and Elevator Lady had vanished. Worse, they’d managed to slip right through the dragnet of Scotland Yard, Metropolitan Police, and SAS shooters that had converged on the scene once our takedown began. How had they done it? I had no fucking idea. But they had simply evaporated. And we confirmed Butch’s body in the elevator. He’d been shivved, bringing the total number of official corpses to three—so far.
Outside, it was chaos. Traffic was gridlocked from the Hammersmith flyover all the way to Knightsbridge; the North End Road was blocked all the way to the District Line Underground stop at West Brompton. The side streets were impossible to navigate, which kept the ambulances from being able to get close. I noticed with some bemusement that however bad the traffic was, it hadn’t managed to keep the press away. Reporters were already buttonholing neighbors to ask them how they felt. The first of what I knew would be dozens of TV vans were pulling up onto the narrow sidewalks, and crews were setting up cameras and lights. Somehow, local television news crews always remind me of the vandals who come down out of the hills after a huge battle to murder the wounded and loot the corpses.
And while all the madness was going on, Mick Owen was being flayed alive by the selfsame deputy assistant home secretary under whose signature this hobbled, bobbled, and badly cobbled operation had been allowed to proceed in the first place. Before the fact, this asshole had wanted to claim every bit of the credit. Now, of course, it was all Mick’s fault—and mine.
And then in the midst of all that shit, someone in the control van got a phone call from a desk assistant at CNN’s London bureau, asking for a comment about the Brook Green School takeover.
The Brook Green School takeover, you say? Isn’t that just a little far-fetched, you say? Far-fetched it may indeed sound. And who the hell knows how CNN even got the van’s phone number in the first place. But it still fucking happened.
I dashed into the van just in time to hear the Metropolitan Police transmission confirming that a one-story, sixty-eight-student primary school that backs up on Brook Green, about three hundred yards north of Hammersmith Road, about a quarter mile from where I currently stood on unsteady sea legs, had indeed, about twelve minutes ago, been invaded and occupied by a trio of armed terrorists.
The cops confirmed that the principal had been immediately shot dead and her body dumped on the front steps as evidence that these tangos were serious. And CNN’s London bureau had received a call from someone who claimed to be one of the participants, demanding to go live, worldwide. And CNN, journalistic paragons that they are, had put her on.
The caller was a woman who said she was an officer in the True IRA. She’d told CNN’s viewers the takeover was a response for the authorities’ wanton murder of TIRA soldiers. She and her companions had weapons and explosives, and they would not, she said, hesitate to use them to kill themselves, and all the children.
I listened to the tape. I’d heard the perfect upper-class English accent before: it was Elevator Lady. I should have killed the bitch when I’d had my arm around her throat, before she’d had a chance to murder one of my SEALs and escape to sing this blood-thirsty TIRA-lira-lira song. But there was no time for hand-wringing now. I had to act quickly and decisively, because I certainly wasn’t about to allow myself—or anyone else—to perpetrate a second goat-fucked operation in one day. After all, I’d lost one of my best people, the tango with the bomb was out and about, and now there’d been a fucking school takeover.
And so, I didn’t give a shit what any deputy assistant home secretary wanted. I was through with bureaucrats and their politically correct methods. I was angry. I was white-hot angry. And when Warriors get white-hot angry, WE ACT. My immediate objective was to take charge of this charlie-foxtrotted op, hit the schoolhouse, get all the kids out alive, and make sure I brought the scumbuckets who’d decided to take inn
ocent lives and endanger children to Roguish justice. By which I mean they’d get to leave the school in fucking body bags.
As the support troops rushed to get everything packed up so we could move sites, I stuck my head into the control van and invited Mick Owen outside. I wanted to palaver in private. He hauled his thick-framed body out of the captain’s chair, shook himself like a wet dog shedding water, and said, “Good idea.”
It had started to drizzle, the kind of misty, cold, fine late autumn drizzle that soaks through to the skin. Mick pulled on a smock in the distinctive SAS camouflage pattern, with one subdued star on each shoulder epaulette. He’d put on weight since we’d last worked together, and his thick hair, combed straight back off his forehead, was flecked through with gray. But he was still as solid as an NFL running back, with thick thighs, narrow waist, bull neck, and extralarge hands, all set on a five foot nine inch frame that weighed in somewhere in the 240-pound range.
Mick had scored a series of rapid-fire promotions since my Green Team had worked with his SAS shooters in London back in the early 1990s. They were the result of his work in places like Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Kosovo. But from the look on his face right now, I knew that Mick would have traded the fucking star in an instant if he could command a brick9 from his beloved SAS Pagoda Troop and take down the fucking school himself.
But that’s not the way the British military works. Generals command. They do not go over the rail to shoot and loot. And so, the shooting and looting would be ceded to others, and I wanted to make sure that when it came to delegating, Mick delegated all those responsibilities to moi.
I’d already been on the cellular to the rest of my DET Bravo team, and they were on their way (if they could ever make it through the gridlocked traffic). It was a small contingent—but all were capable shooters who’d worked together for a long time. I’d brought Terry Devine to London. He was now a radioman second class, and he’d proved his worth in Germany and Azerbaijan. In fact, I’d nicknamed him Timex, because he can take a licking but still keeps on kicking (ass). Rotten Randy Michaels, my E-9 former Army Ranger, had made the trip, too. Rotten is precisely the kind of asshole I want around when the merde hits the old ventilateur. And since I brought Rotten, I had to add his swim buddy, Nigel, all 115 pounds of him, to the contingent, too. That was fine with me. Nigel (real name Rupert Collis) grew up not ten kliks from here, in the mean streets of London’s East End, and if I was going to have a Rupert amongst my enlisted men, it might as well be Nigel.10 DET Bravo’s best sniper was a toothpick-sucking, snuff-dipping, tattoo-enriched fair-haired boy named Goober. Goober is from Georgia. And if he has a last name, no one knows what it is. Frankly, I don’t give a damn what his last name might be. All I care about is the fact that Goober can hit a fucking dime at a thousand yards. Not once, either, but every time he pulls the trigger. And bringing up the rear was Digger O’Toole, real name Eddie, a swinging-dicked, big-balled, go-any-where, do-anything kid from Hollywood, Florida, whose idea of fun (when he isn’t chasing pussy) includes reducing structures to small pieces of rubble.
I pulled Mick between two police vans to keep us away from prying camera lenses and lip readers. “Mick, I can’t afford another fuckup.”
The look on his face told me he hadn’t needed to hear that comment right now. But he still nodded his head in glum agreement. “Agreed.” He scuffed his thick boot sole against the pavement. “So, how do you think we should handle this new development?”
“If you don’t mind taking some heat, I have five people on their way right now who can do the job and do it right.”
“Your SEALs?”
“That’s right.”
He grimaced. “That’s not going to go down well at Whitehall.”
I jerked my thumb toward the apartment house. “Mick, Whitehall was just responsible for that fuckup; which fuckup they are right now, even as we speak, trying to hang around your neck and mine. So, screw Whitehall. Screw joint operations. I just lost a man—and fuck it, I’m gonna make those bastards pay. I want to get even. So do my people. I’m going to take this one on by myself so it gets done right.”
Mick looked into my eyes. “That’s easy for you to say, Dick. You don’t have to live with Whitehall on a permanent basis. I do.”
“But you also know I’m right. SO-Nineteen can’t do this as well as I can. SAS can, but it will take you three hours to bring your hostage-rescue team down from SAS Hereford. There are eight shooters from Twenty-two Regiment detailed to DET Bravo. Some of them are already on site. We both know they’re not hostage rescue specialists. But there’s a top-notch sniper team, and the other six blokes are capable and they’re bright. My guys and I have worked with them over the past three weeks. You give SAS the perimeter to hold, and let me deploy the snipers. Then you let me go in and kill ’em all. Because that’s what I do, Mick.”
“You’re being terribly blunt.”
I tapped the receiver of my MP5. “Nobody made me an O-Six because I did well in touchy-feely. They did it because of my skill with a fucking submachine gun.”
His expression softened. “Still have your sense of humor when dealing with flag officers, I see.”
I saw by his face that if I pressed him, he’d let us do the job, so I went in for the kill. “Mick, you know and I know that my guys can end this before the situation gets any more out of hand.” I paused to gauge his body language. It told me he was looking for a way to let me go in. “But we have to act—act now. Before they kill anybody else. Before they detonate the fucking Cubanol. Before Whitehall tries to take charge.”
“But—”
I attacked. “I’m not gonna do any more talking. I’m just gonna go Rogue.”
“Go Rogue?”
“Unless otherwise directed, I’m gonna set things up the way I want ’em set. I’m gonna move. I’m gonna attack. I’m gonna take the school down—my way. That lets you wriggle past the ‘joint operation’ bullshit you’ve been stuck with, and allows me to get the fucking job done.”
Mick sighed. Then he scratched the hair just above his right ear. “I can’t take another cock-up today, Dick.”
He was going to bend. “I know. We won’t let you down.”
“Three fuckin’ men are dead already—one of them yours,” Mick said, his voice flat. “That’s three more than I lost in eleven years of operations in Northern Ireland.”
“In Northern Ireland you didn’t have a dozen pin-striped assholes from Whitehall looking over your shoulder on a minute to minute basis.”
“I don’t mind ’em looking,” Mick said vehemently. “I mind it when they try to tell me how to do my job.”
He was right of course. And the situation isn’t exclusive just to the British. Think about the past few “situations” in which the United States has become involved, gentle reader. In Iraq, instead of engaging in a campaign to bring down Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War, the White House waffled, and Saddam has outlasted the last three American presidents. In Mogadishu, White House staffers set the rules of engagement, resulting in the deaths of more than two dozen American military people. During the Kosovo war, noncombatant politicians in the White House decided what targets to hit and what targets to leave alone, thus ensuring that NATO forces would not bring the war to a speedy close.
I could give you other examples, but there’s no time right now. Right now, I had to assemble every piece of information I could about the school. We had to set up a perimeter and keep the press away. And I had to come up with a plan that would allow us to take the tangos down without losing a single child. If there was even one tiny corpse brought out of that school, we’d have screwed up past all redemption.
4
SINCE I AM AN OPTIMIST, I WILL GIVE YOU THE GOOD news first. The GN was that the school site was controllable. The building itself was rectangular in shape and a single story in height. It was surrounded by half a dozen old shade trees—chestnuts, I think—on the sides, and by a huge swath of Brook Green on th
e rear. The street on which it sat, a cul-de-sac called Latymer Court, was L-shaped, allowing us to monitor all access, and also keep our control location out of sight of the school. Mick emptied the eight houses facing the school building and turned them into observation posts. He tapped into the phone and power lines, so we took control of them. Hammersmith Road, the six-lane avenue just to the south into which Latymer Court emptied, was shut down, too.
Mick also took care of another important detail: he set up an isolated crisis center for the parents of the kids who were being held, just as much to keep them away from the press as to make sure they received accurate updates on what was going on. Hostage parents caterwauling into cameras is no way to help solve the problem. Indeed, when politicians see parents screaming about doing something, they often react by making bad, even deadly, decisions.
As for the Brook Green School building, there were two eight-foot-high-by-four-foot-wide windows in each of the six classrooms and the cafeteria, and narrower windows, also eight feet high, in the offices. There were no window shades, which gave us a tremendous advantage. There were two entrances: a front door and a rear door. Sniping positions were either from the houses directly across from the school, or from the green. Although the building had a basement, there was no way to get in and out through it. So the good news was that we had the tangos bottled up, and we could set up a wide perimeter, giving us a lot of latitude to move around. The hour also worked in our favor: it was now 1520—3:20 P.M. in civilian time—and it would be growing dark within the hour. I like darkness because it conceals my moves. I asked Mick to cumshaw a bunch of work lights so we could illuminate the school. The more we lit the place up, the less the bad guys would be able to see what we were up to.
The bad news of course was obvious. There were more than five dozen kids in that school, as well as six teachers, one janitor, two cafeteria workers, a secretary, and the assistant to the principal. That made seventy-one-plus hostages, if everyone had shown up.
Detachment Bravo Page 4